I’ve always been told that shivering/teeth chattering when cold is supposed to help our bodies warm up. However, I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve been cold enough to shiver and have also noticed a positive difference in my body temperature after the shivering started. So why do we still shiver if it doesn’t help all that much? Or does it help but in a way we cannot really feel?
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Shivering helps keep our core body temperature up. Think about the last time you did heavy work and really exerted yourself. Your body started to sweat to cool down because flexing muscles generates heat. Shivering is just the body automatically flexing muscles over and over again to warm up the blood flowing into the heart.
Now you don’t feel warmer because the warming effect is mostly in the blood moving into your chest. Blood flowing out will get cooled as it reaches the extremities. We feel heat and cold in the nerves closer to the surface of our skin. So while the blood flowing to our core is slightly warmer, we’re still losing heat through our skin and the nerves sense that as being cold.
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